STRUCTURE OF THE AUSTRALIAN ACCIDENT REGISTER

The Accident Register website is set up as a non-profit organisation, primarily as a service to the Australian outdoors community. It is run on a very low budget and until April 2006 was funded mainly out of the pockets of the editorial committee. Until April 2006 the site only covered the Blue Mountains region of NSW but recently the committee decided to expand the scope and cover all outdoors and adventure accidents around the country.

The site has always been very well received by the Blue Mountains adventure community with reports being read widely by recreational users (climbers and canyoners etc) and also for educational purposes (a number of TAFE colleges and clubs use the reports as part of their student or member education). Early in 2006 the committee felt that the time was right to go national and to put the Accident Register on a proper financial footing to ensure the long term viability of the site.

The plan is to solicit private funding of $500 to carry the site through till October 2006. We've received approx $500 in pledges on some of the web forums so we will call these very generous offers in to keep us going to October. By then we hope to have secured $2000 for the following year and a funding strategy to find $2000 each year therafter.

In order to avoid the need to set up a bank account and all the paraphenalia involved with setting up a legal entity, the committee has decided to operate under the financial auspices of an existing company. Two of the committee members run an environmental consulting business and they have agreed to hold incoming funds in a dedicated account and to pay bills, staff and cover the necessary workers compensation obligations. They will not charge for this service. Each year they will supply a set of accounts to show where the incoming funds came from and how they were spent. These accounts will be made available to anyone who asks.

Our employed research person will operate from the offices of the other committee member's publishing business. This business will supply a computer, phone and email at no cost to the Accident Register (other than call costs).

Please refer to our Editorial Independence policy here to see how we will avoid a conflict of interest when writing reports.

Funds Required

If you can help with funding for the site or if you have contacts with an organisation who may be interested please contact us.

Where does the money go?

1. Phone calls and research costs. To properly research, validate and write up each report takes quite a few phone calls and emails.

2. Time. The editorial committee have until now volunteered their time and after many hundreds of hours it's time to set this up more professionally. We plan to pay a researcher and the committee a very modest hourly rate to cover the time taken to research, validate, write up and upload each report. Once we go national we anticipate that the site could record upwards of 50 reports per year. Our $2000 per year budget will see this spent at about $40 per report. This should allow about two hours of research, writing and editing time plus a small amount for phone call costs.

3. Web hosting and domain registration.

If any readers wish to discuss any aspect of our structure and operations please contact us.

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